Previews

Alter Echo

Take on the role of morphing combat psychic Nevin in this cool action/platformer.

Alter Echo is an action/platformer with a healthy selection of melee attacks and projectile weapons, a trippy sci-fi storyline, and a wisecracking action hero -- although perhaps his wittiest bon mot, "I specialize in job dissatisfaction," lacks the punch of something like "Yippie-ki-yay, motherf***er!" (There are times when only profanity will do, y'know?) Alter Echo's game-design influences are obvious -- a little MDK here, a little Soul Reaver there, a requisite "tribute" to Devil May Cry's combo system -- but the developers at Outrage have combined familiar gameplay aspects in pleasing ways. Alter Echo even manages to get away with a variation of "bullet-time," the most overused gameplay feature -- heck, the most overused anything of the past five years.

Alter Echo casts you as Nevin, a young man of vague ethnicity, following the lead of Jak & Daxter in providing a one-face-represents-all protagonist who won't alienate gamers in Japan and Europe. Nevin is a psychic with a gift for shaping a substance called MultiPlast, which is found only on the planet Proteus. MultiPlast is both a floor wax and a dessert topping, able to be shaped into anything from clothing to spacecraft. Unfortunately for Nevin, he's arrived on Proteus to discover that Paavo, the head of a planetside research facility, has gone completely mental. Paavo is the inventor of EchoPlast, a variation of MultiPlast with the ability to distort and stop time, and he's so protective of his creation that he plans to destroy the human race before it can be exploited. Nevin is the unfortunate bastard given the task of destroying Paavo before he wipes out humanity, and he has to fight his way through an entire planet of Paavo-created bad guys to find him.

Nevin starts the game in a super-suit supplied by Proteus, which is alive as a result of Paavo's experiments. Proteus despises its father, and will do whatever he can to help Nevin -- which unfortunately isn't much more than act as a "magic voice," walking the player through the early sections of the game. (Alter Echo is divvied up into a host of small, tight, and relatively linear levels, with a combo-counting stat screen at the end of each.) Credit to Proteus for not breaking the fourth wall as so many games do by directly stating "Press X to jump," et cetera; the button functions are displayed on-screen after Big P stops speaking.

At the start of the game, Nevin's suit is in its Melee form configuration, a torn-cape/big-sword combination which bears more than a passing resemblance to Raziel. Nevin starts out with a handful of combos, and can purchase nearly a dozen more with the points earned by using his current combos on his enemies. The Melee form is Nevin's fastest form, and the only one in which he can double jump. Later, Nevin gets his Gun form, in which he lumbers around more slowly than Marlon Brando, but gains a formidable array of gun and grenade attacks. Even later, Nevin earns the Stealth form, in which he's able to pounce upon and bitch-slap enemies, climb up Proteus-created pathways, become invisible for limited periods of time, and grab enemies and power-ups with a Gene Simmons-esque tongue. The game's considerable and reasonably clever action-puzzle content requires the player to make roughly equal use of all three forms -- although the issue of why Nevin's suit can only change into three forms, since he and Proteus could presumably shape its EchoPlast into almost anything -- is never addressed.

By far the most original and unusual aspect of Alter Echo is the Time Dilation mode. When the suit has adequate energy, pressing R3 calls up a grid on which every enemy is depicted with an icon. You watch a golf-game meter at the bottom of the screen, and press up, left, right, or down on the D-pad when the meter is in the zone. The goal is to build a chain that connects all the enemy icons, which triggers a "bullet-time" sequence in which Nevin chops up the baddies. This sequence is a bit too long and not flashy enough for an eye-candy reward, but there's plenty of time to fix this in the mix.

Alter Echo utilizes a combo-driven combat system.

In the preview rev I played, Alter Echo's in-game camera is rendered with a mild fisheye-lens effect, which is especially noticeable when the camera rapidly rotates around Nevin. This effect is used for creative reasons ("screen distortions" are specifically cited as one of the game's "PostFX" visual tricks), but it leaves the player with a vaguely unpleasant feeling, like when you're out shopping and suddenly wonder if you left the iron on.

In its current form, barring the sure-to-be-addressed camera issues, Alter Echo is an above-average title that combines near-psychedelic audiovisuals with clever takes on well-worn gameplay conventions.